Letter from the Executive Director

 

Hello everyone!

Can you believe Cruisin’ The Coast is celebrating our 30th Anniversary this year? What a great ride it has been so far!

If you weren’t here for CTC 2025, you missed a great time. And if you were here, we appreciate you attending and enjoying the fantastic music, incredible food and awesome vehicles on our gorgeous Mississippi Gulf Coast. As you’ve probably heard by now, it was a record-breaking year with 10,334 registered vehicles from 41 states, Australia, Canada, England and Germany. We even had 1,484 registered participants enjoy our event for the first time. Cruisin’ The Coast 2025 was certainly one for the record books and we couldn’t have done it without all of you!

We returned Cruise Central to Jones Park in the beautiful Gulfport Small Craft Harbor and from most of the feedback we’ve received, you enjoyed the venue. There were some hiccups, mainly due to the rain in the area on the first weekend, but thanks to the hard work of the City of Gulfport grounds crew, those obstacles were overcome with a lot of mulch. We are thankful to those city workers!

Jones Park proved to be a great venue with plenty of parking for registered vehicles and spectators. We hope you took advantage of the Coast Transit Authority shuttles that ran along Jones Park Drive, as well as from the CTA Parking Garage. According to CTA data, more than 9,000 riders used their trolleys during the week at Jones Park.

Our legion of Host Car Club Volunteers, along with our Cruisin’ Krewe community volunteers, certainly worked hard in 2025 so you could have a great time. As a matter of fact, 544 volunteers gave 10,177 documented hours of their time to help, host and provide hospitality to all our visitors. We know you all appreciate their hard work as much as we do!

And now, we are deep into working on some great ideas to celebrate our 30th Anniversary. Look for upcoming details on the OFFICIAL CTC Facebook and Instagram pages, as well as the July Newsletter.

For the third straight year we are proud to announce Mississippi Gulf Fresh Seafood will be our presenting sponsor! And yes, they will be providing free Mississippi Gulf Fresh Seafood samples at Cruise Central, so don’t miss out.

I’d also like to thank all of our sponsors. They provide the fuel that makes CTC run and we couldn’t do this event without them. There are too many to name individually, but I encourage you to go to our website, www.cruisinthecoast.com, look them up and click on their link. And while you’re on our website, if you haven’t, register your 1989 or older vehicle for our event. Or you can complete and mail in the enclosed form. Either way, get registered and start your plans now! That Early Bird registration deadline is August 15, so don’t delay!

See you down the road,

Sherwood R. “Woody” Bailey, Jr.
Vice Chairman & Executive Director